How to Restore a Get Backup Archive on Windows Platform

Get Backup offers you a reliable backup solution due to its use of standard file formats and cross-platform cryptography tools. Whether you are on a Mac or Windows, you can extract your files without having Get Backup installed. Since there is no Windows version of Get Backup, third-party software can be used to unpack files on this platform.

From the “How to Restore a Get Backup Archive Manually” article, you can learn how to restore your files on Mac OS X without the use of Get Backup. Please read the “General Approach” and “File Extensions” sections to understand the further explanations.

Below is an explanation of the main archive types and the way each one is unarchived.

TAR Archive (.tgz or .tar)

TAR archives are supported by many archive utilities (WinZip, Win RAR, 7-Zip and so on). If you have one, right-click on the archive in Explorer and see if there is an extraction command in the pop-up menu. Otherwise, open the archive in the utility and choose the extraction option.

TAR Archive Split into Parts (.aaa)

The file extension with alphabetically altering letters indicates that the archive was split into parts. You need to merge these parts to have a solid .tgz or .tar archive. How to handle a .tgz or .tar file is described above.

To combine the parts, you can use a third-party utility which provides a graphic user interface (recommended), or use a utility built into the operating system.

The PeaZip software is capable of restoring your archive from the parts. Do the following:

Change the file extension from letters to numbers. Replace aaa with 001, aab with 002, and so on. You should preserve the sequence of the parts. To rename a file, right-click on it and choose Rename.

In PeaZip, select the first part with the .001 extension and choose the Extract command.

MS Windows provides a built-in utility to combine parts of a file. You need to compose a command line containing the paths to the parts and the path to save the created file. Then run this command in PowerShell. This is an example for merging three parts:

Here “c:\source.aaa”, “c:\source.aab”, “c:\source.aac” are paths to the parts. The last path “c:\dest.tgz” is for the destination file. Replace them with your own. Note that each path is followed by “ /b” (space, slash and letter b).

Note that on older versions of Windows such as Windows 7, you should use this command: